Berkley Center

Thursdays, 2:00-4:30

New North 204, Georgetown Main Campus
Professors Terry Pinkard & Henry S. Richardson

Schedule of Confirmed Visitors and Sessions

FALL 2014

Segment I: Introduction: On the possibility of objective moral innovation

1. [Aug. 28] Objectivity, relativism, and embeddedness in cultural practices and social institutions
Robert Pippin (University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought)

2. [Sept. 4] Moral change: an historian’s perspective on the case of slavery
Adam Rothman (Georgetown, History)

3. [Sept. 11] The possibility of objective moral innovation: an initial sketch
Henry S. Richardson (Georgetown, Philosophy)

4. [Sept. 18] The Genesis of Values
José Casanova (Georgetown, Sociology)

5. [Sept. 25] Motivating case: The establishment of medical research ethics
Jonathan Moreno (Penn, Medical Ethics & Health Policy)

6. [Oct. 2] Moral innovation and individual discretion under the direction of (imperfect) duty
Barbara Herman (UCLA, Philosophy)

Segment II: Historical Interlude

7. [Oct. 9] Kant on Moral Community
Kyla Ebels-Duggan (Northwestern, Philosophy)

8. [Oct. 16] Hegel on embodying morality in social & cultural institutions
Terry Pinkard (Georgetown, Philosophy)

9. [Oct. 23] Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on inexplicit understandings
William Blattner (Georgetown, Philosophy)

Segment III: Preview of the following semester’s trilateral-comparison issues

10. [Oct. 30] Introduction to the issue of religious freedom
Michael Kessler (Georgetown, Government, Law, and Berkley Center)

11. [Nov. 6] Introduction to the ethics of global warming
Madison Powers (Georgetown, Philosophy)

Segment IV: Intertemporal cases: Moral change in progress

12. [Nov. 13] The predicament of illegal immigrants: an anthropologist’s perspective
Denise Brennan (Georgetown, Anthropology)

13. [Nov. 20] The brave new world of contemporary privacy: a lawyer’s perspective
Anita Allen (U. of Pennsylvania, Law)

14. [Dec. 4] Efforts at urban sustainability: an ecologist’s perspective
Ali Whitmer (Georgetown, Biology)

SPRING 2015

Segment V: The articulation of the moral community via practices and institutions

15. [Jan. 8] Rights, moral powers, and directed duties
Henry S. Richardson (Georgetown, Philosophy)

16. [Jan. 15] Embodiment, temporality, and norm-generation
Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance (each Georgetown, Philosophy)

17. [Jan. 22] The critique of cultural practices and social forms
Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt University, Berlin, Philosophy)

Segment VI: First trilateral comparison: Global warming and the claims of future generations

1. [Jan. 29] Ethics and the Farther Future
Dale Jamieson (NYU, Environmental Studies and Philosophy)

2. Feb. 5: A community of Others: How can a Confucian autonomous district affect our ethical responses to global warming?
Zhang Xianglong (Peking University, Philosophy)

3. [Feb. 12] The Limits of Intergenerational Justice
Anja Karnein (SUNY Binghampton, Philosophy)

Segment VII: Knitting together a moral community

4. [Feb. 19] Overlapping consensus
Samuel Freeman (University of Pennsylvania, Philosophy)

5. [Feb. 26] Religious freedom in the U.S. (see Segment VIII)
Martha C. Nussbaum (U. of Chicago, Philosophy, Law, and Divinity)

6. [Mar. 5] Socially embodied freedom as a precondition of legitimate social change
Christoph Menke (Goethe University, Frankfurt, Philosophy)

7. [Mar. 19] From the governmental to the deliberative social self-determination of rights
Klaus Günther (Frankfurt, Law)

8. [Mar. 26] Overcoming dualisms: history and truth, moral disagreement and political community
Charles Larmore (Brown University, Philosophy)

Segment VIII: Second trilateral comparison (cont.): Religious freedom

9. [Apr. 9] Religious freedom in the People’s Republic of China
Li Tiangang (Fudan, History) and Sun Xiangchen (Fudan, Philosophy)

10. [Apr. 16] Religious freedom in Canada
Charles Taylor (McGill, Philosophy)

Segment IX: Closing session

11. [Apr. 23] A Critical Theory of Normativity
Rainer Forst (Goethe University, Frankfurt, Philosophy)